F&B 2017E LACAN

okay luck ha so it's a very long paper this paper was an early version was written back in nineteen and presented here in about 1984 and we had a study group here for four years and we read through a kree and then I just turned away from it because it was so abstract and I felt remote from clinical experience and I was in analytic training and was interested in working with living breathing human beings who were in pain and so I turned away it turned to object relations theory increasingly I was finding Melanie Klein of great interest but in recent years I find myself getting interested in look again I mean the title of this article is called look Lacanian theory appreciation and critique so I'm quite critical of aspects of Lacan but I think there's a lot to appreciate in Lacan so but but you know he is exasperated and it touches on a point that that I I make in the paper which is Lacan evokes transferences in people you know he he seems to revoke split transferences like you either fall in love with them and you fall into a kind of fascination or you just hate him and can't abide him at all people either love or hate Lacan it seems okay yeah in this little book the triumph of religion Lacan says what I've noticed is that if people don't understand my my acree the latter does something to people I've often observed this people don't understand anything this is perfectly true for a while but the writings do something to them he says I think that's true I think those writings did something to me for sure at times of course they made me hate him because I'd be reading 40 pages of obscure stuff that just made me feel stupid and ill-educated and then I'd encounter something that struck me as really important really exciting really brilliant so I couldn't throw the book away in getting exasperated at the obscurantism I was in good company because Heidegger Heidegger says I haven't so far been able to get anything at all out of this obviously outlandish text Heidegger writes well there's an outlandish text and he distances himself from the reader he makes it hard for the reader he keeps the reader in the dark groom bears a points out he hoodwinked the reader and that's a statistic thing to do so there's a kind of anal sadism going on in in Lacoste texts a little bit like Nietzsche Nietzsche was actually more accessible than Lacan is in my view and Butler Nietzsche said I don't want to be understood by just anybody I'm hard to understand because I don't want to be understood by the Hawaii polloi you know there are other places where he says the same thing and he says because I mean he's writing for noble minds not the mass mind not the masked man not the he's writing for the over man not the the ubermensch not the under man not the heard man he doesn't want to be understood by the heard man I think what God is aggressively obscure for sure okay one of the things I I quickly appreciated and that kept me reading look ah of course is that unlike most psychoanalysts except perhaps Erich Fromm and a few others Lacroix understood what I had already long understood because my training as the sociologist was in the school of symbolic interactionism the flawed of George Herbert Mead and his followers in the Chicago School of Sociology man is a symbol animal and and the human behavior cannot be reduced to the biological I mean in many ways sociologies of discipline arose precisely as anti biology anti biological reductionism anti psychological reductionism certainly a meal Durkheim pretty much defines sociology as not psychology and and so Michael training was to resist biological reductionism and Michael training was to think of well the three worlds hypothesis that we touched on earlier geosphere the dead planet then life biosphere and then new off sphere and only human only human beings exist in the newest fear and this is not necessarily a good thing because our uniqueness is also our unique destructiveness but the newest fear is the world of symbolism and culture and consciousness and we've talked about Kierkegaard's interpretation of the myth of Genesis precisely as the animal who wakes up and leaves well we don't leave the biosphere our bodies keep us in the biosphere but we also enter into the newest fear we developed self-consciousness and we develop a capacity for free choice and therefore we develop a capacity for guilt and and we wear this peculiar animal living in this world of symbolism and lacA of course completely gets this and it was a relief for me to encounter a psychoanalyst who actually gets this and so that certainly is a major major strength of of lakas theory Jung gets it does he ever talk about the newest fear of being something that transcends those other two realms but includes them so rather than just there's three separate things that it the Neo spirit contains the yeah absolutely but they're each their irreducible to one another they require but they're irreducible like you can't reduce the biosphere to the lithosphere and you can't reduce the newest fear to the biosphere however if you can't reduce mind to brain but but brain is required for mind I always say that's a no-brainer my brain is is is the necessary but insufficient on log for mine I think Lacan understands this eye doesn't philosophize about this particular thing but but but take his distinction between human desire and organic need organic need human beings have because we're biological organisms and we have needs to defecate and urinate and consume food but Freud confused human desire which is on the level of the newest fear with organic need and human desire doesn't work the way the need to urinate if you don't urinate you're gonna burst human aggression doesn't work like that we don't need to go out because we've got an aggressive Drive we don't need to go out and pick fights every once in a while to to vent some of the build-up of aggression like analogous to the build-up of urine in the bladder that needs to be emptied I mean you know there's a confusion here but but to your question lacas is well aware that we are also animals with organic needs he's just saying Freud confused the two levels that's all well often felt that people do in a sense need the stress and aggression and if there isn't a no cage they don't have an opportunity or notation to it to experience that they'll make it up hmm I guess it depends on how we understand aggression sir there's certainly evidence from animal experiments and everything else that that certainly primates have have a need for curiosity they'll often forego food in order to get a look at a different direction that out of their cages and to see something new so so I think yeah we we have a need for new experience but whether we have a need to be aggressive I think we we could get into the whole debate of trying to distinguish between assertion and aggression assertiveness uh yeah and I wouldn't want to mince words in that way I just feel like we are mammalian species that evolved over 200 million years in a fighter flight environment most of the time were used to a high level of stress in 21st century we potentially don't could live in lives of no stress at all and yet we make it up so we impose it on ourselves because it's you know encoded I know I'm getting terribly biologists well but listen no my answer to that would be that we probably do have many people have a great need to vent aggression I will agree with you but not because aggression is instinctual but because what is instinctual or built-in is an aggressive reaction to frustration and to the extent that we have been frustrated we have become aggressive and now therefore we have all of this aggression that we need to bend but this is not instinctual aggression this is reactive aggression mmm-hmm that would be my my take on it yeah okay oh I wanted to make a point about jean-paul Sartre who is the who is the the literary theorist who writes about the imperiled bloom writes a book about the anxiety of influence and how he says the new poet has to kind of kill the previously dominant poet to get him off his back in order to open up up space for his own creativity it's an oedipal theory obviously of creativity you got to kill the old man in order to open up a space for yourself and so just applying this who was the old dominant poet of Paris it was jean-paul Sartre throughout the 40s 50s into the 60s right then along comes lucam Lacan has to kill Sartre he doesn't discuss Sartre very much that's the silent treatment it's very effective among intellectuals the Freudians the established Freudians are very good at that too I mean you know if they don't like what a theorist is saying they don't bother to critique him they just ignore him so I think that Lacan does a fair amount of it but a car implicitly borrows so much from Sartre because Sartre is also in a different language he's not emphasizing the linguistic the semiotic but he's still describing as was Heidegger as was Kierkegaard he was describing human existence exist stepping outside of the biosphere living in the new Oh sphere I mean Sartre was described describing our existential condition assembling animals when he wasn't emphasizing semiotic he was doing phenomenology phenomenological description of life human life in the new Oh sphere he introduces the idea of Linnea because a part of being human is living with the field of the non-existent which is where time is yesterday doesn't exist in more leaves traces empty beer bottles from last night whatever ashtrays that haven't been unfilled but but yesterday doesn't exist anymore tomorrow doesn't exist yet and so human beings are living constantly between these these these non beings man is the being who brings nothingness into the world we create gaps I talked earlier about sart's brilliant example going into the into the cafe waiting for Pierre and yet payer hasn't showed up and so the whole cafe is filled with absence of PR anus everywhere you look there is Pierre absent until Pierre shows up and then all of that absence of tyrannous just evaporates because there's Pierre and so you know we move through life haunted by the negative in this sense and for Sartre desire is grounded in lack well the constable idea of monkey at try but lack of being the human beings fundamental lack of being this is what Sartre is all about this is this is what Sartre is describing I mean a human being can never be anything in the way that a table is a table I can't be heterosexual in them in the way that a table is a table I can't be a coward in the way that the table is a table I can't be an ex-alcoholic in the way that a table is all it takes is one drink right I can't be anything in the way that the table is a table so I have to wake up every morning and try and figure out who it is then I'm being and get the old show back on the road again and I can't rest because I can't be in the way that a table can be so Lacan translates these insights into the language of semiotic and signifiers and signifies but he's really trying to get out the same kind of insight someone was at you just I just and when I hear all of this I just think over and over again about the denial of death I mean this whole idea of nothing in the fundamental realization of my being is that and one day I will not yes and all of my I guess to try and put it in the terms you're developing here all my narcissistic striving to be omnipotent and overcome that feeling of inevitability right is a massive defense all right well it's it's all driven by the this fundamental encounter with nothingness my own demise right I am no longer right well we've talked about these becker and all of that but but there's a sense in which what you're saying is quite compatible with with Heidegger or whose whole philosophy you could say as a meditation on death I mean meeting and talking is is is a meditation on death and and but interestingly you know like Heidegger argues that it is only by facing my own most death no one can die for me and so death is is is is very peculiarly my own it's only by facing that because he talks about dustman the one well of course one dies right people die of course no I'm dying and no one's gonna do it for me and this confronts me with my individuality and only by facing this says Heidegger can I move into the field of authentic being otherwise I'm losing myself in group psychology instead of individual psychology and and the confrontation with death certainly brings me to my individuality right so can this be tough any of these ideas be tied through to the look the insistence on you know acceptance of castrate like that's oh yeah acceptance of the inevitability of my death well he even does have himself nearly mortal he does that himself he does it in his peculiar obscure obscure away one way he does it is he draws on on a discussion he's quite droll you know I mean he's humorous but he draws on the game of bridge and he talks about how in bridge there's a dummy the dummy hand and and he plays with that idea of the dummy and but no there is death in Loch Awe there's no doubt whoa look I mean what does Lacan say one of his formulas the word is the death of the thing the word is the death of the thing he says and and of course there's this division between the word and the thing which is the division between the signifier and the signified and that is a cut and a kind of castration and his first castration yes yes and then and then there's yup always felt I don't know he doesn't exactly put it this way but there's another cut you see big ass line small ass line oh no this is not a Lacanian magime this is my math team for I'm trying to understand this and also to try to bring Derrida into the picture of it big s is the signifier small s is the signified and O is the actual object like they're in the world okay so there's two cuts the cut between signifier and signified is the indication that no one there's no one exclusive signifier that can signify the signified okay okay the idea of of a house can be the signal the signal the signified of a house it can be signified through a range of different signifiers House dome Casa Maison okay we can come up with a million signifiers that will signify the same signified the house but then of course I want to say there's another cut because because the idea of of because the actual house can be approached from many different ways I mean you know you can approach the house from the south from the north from the east from the west you can take a picture of it from a satellite so any picture you have of that you can have a million pictures of the same house no one picture is going to grasp the entirety of the house and then all of these pictures can be named in a million different ways so we're dealing with arbitrariness here arbitrariness between signifier and signified and a certain arbitrariness between signified and the thing that it seeks to represent and so again these are gaps these are nothingness is well how does human consciousness work according to Sartre Sartre says I know this cop by secreting and nothingness like it is an octopus octopi that secrete ink into the until like an octopus secretes ink so the human mind secretes nothingness we are the beings who bring nothingness into the world so to know the cop I have to secrete in nothingness and I wrap the nothingness around this cop I place in nothingness between me as subject nor and the cup as object but then I have to place a second nothingness around the cup to separate it from the table I first separated from myself as knower then I separate it from the table and this is how consciousness works in other words he's saying consciousness operates by distinguishing this from that placing nothingness into the world Oh on the subject of death Sartre writes this little autobiography called the words and in that biography he says that during the late thirties early forties he and all of his fellow intellectuals in Paris were reading Heidegger and they were all thinking about death and they were all having little meltdowns they were having existential crises they were having panic attacks they were they were going on and on about death fear and trembling but he was utterly undisturbed and none of this was getting to him and then he writes it finally got to him death finally got to him after the dropping of the first atom bomb and then he realized the reason it hadn't got to him before is because he thought his books would survive but the idea of a nuclear catastrophe in which all the libraries would burn up then his books wouldn't survive then he was hit by definitely right right it's an object in look ah it belongs to the real we have imaginary symbolic and real the three registers and the real is composed of all of those things that are not symbolized I suppose if you want to draw a parallel to beyond those would be the raw beta elements so what's the difference between the symbolized and the imaginary then I don't understand that oh because this sum in the sense of symbolic interactionism both of them are forms of symbolization but in lakhan's language he's distinguishing between words and images pictures and words words exactly that's the difference so the the world of the imaginary is the world of the image and in Loch Awe and Lacanian for the vast material with horror like Kurt's in Conrad the horror the horror yeah an apocalypse now yeah they associated with the horror except for William Richardson prominent Lacanian who's also a Jesuit priest who still celebrates the mass every week he's one of the few who doesn't split the real he acknowledges that the real can be horror or it can be aw the the the the the the the the beauty at while there's some of the followers of the kleinian analyst Don Donnell Meltzer hypothesized that the that the babies early experience is that he's just overwhelmed with awe at the beauty of the mother okay now Richardson is the one Lacanian who can conceive of the real as the the awesomely beautiful but most Lacanian is associated the real with the horrific that's a that's a horrible bias you know it's it was a little bit like Ernest Becker's bias that the rear that the that the real is is analogy it's in its death you know I mean the Lacanian send Becker's share I say this in my book but they they both are have this split attitude towards ultimate reality they do not see both sides now you know it's very one-sided in that sense yeah-ha continues to sort of remember the baby is born into the real and it experiences itself as liqueur more so lay the body in bits and pieces originally fragmentation chaos and this is a painful chaos that we seek to escape and that Lacan says the child escapes at around six months when it sees it's image in the mirror and it sees itself as a non threat and it identifies with that image it misidentifies it actually takes itself to be that image yeah that's been obvious question yeah what what about human beings for the thousands of years before mirrors I mean the First Nations people wandering around the great plains of North America before we all got here surely you know at six months of life developed that transcendental with litical transcendental unity of a perception where it all comes together and you are one and your eyes and your ear and it's all working in a space-time no mirrors right what are they doing I don't know about this thing you're talking about this transcendental thing you're talking about but I think the Lacanian answer would be there has always been water and like narcissus one can see oneself in the mirror of the water but more broadly he makes it very clear that he's not talking about literal mirrors he's talking about the mirror held up to us by society he's talking about about Charles Horton Cooley he doesn't mention Cooley but the Looking Glass self in nineteen oh eight or nine Cooley promotes the looking-glass so and Winnicott who actually was in communication with Lacan wrote about the child's seeing himself in the mirror of the mother's eyes so we're talking not just literal mirrors we're talking about the mother her eyes okay so why did he do all this stuff with monkeys and and what you mentioned in his paper yeah so like clearly he's at one level as kind of thinking very literally it was all of this and it was a big mess in the suburb well he's allowed he's allowed to get confused and like anyone else I mean I think it was ambition I think I think he wanted to be able to ground his ideas in something positivistic and substantial and I think it was a huge mistake he doesn't understand himself he should have followed Freud and turned to Sophocles Greek mythology and he should have stuck on that level that I called poetic truth which i think is still true you mentioned the earlier book the looking-glass itself which I have not read but I have heard of in your estimation is his idea of the mirror self substantially different than that earlier yeah cooly cooly is is talking about how we are our sense of shell as is George Herbert Mead Mead expands on on Cooley by by making the self a dialogue between the eye and the me the eye subject and the me object and the me is the imaginary because the me is any image I have of myself and and therefore any image of myself will always exclude the I who is like the photographer who never gets into the picture whenever I'm looking at myself the self I see is excluding the self that's looking right and George this is George Herbert Mead who trained a whole influenced oh he was a philosopher here is a Chicago he hardly ever published anything what we have was published by people assembling just know so I guess my question is when we encounter lakhan's mirror metaphor yeah are we are we seeing a substantially new idea or as it varies no no we're it's a new idea because the symbolic interactionists and and Cooley they did not that they had the idea that we acquire a sense of self from the mirror held up to us by others but they did not have this idea that we addictively mistake ourselves for that they did not they did not have the idea that we glom onto that in order to escape from a horrible originally fragmentation and it's interesting isn't it that these thinkers are operating in the era before and you noted this historical cleavage before the emergence of the culture of narcissism yes when psycho analysts notebooks were full of a different kind of right neuroses which wasn't narcissist all right I think I'm remembering some of your earlier stuff correct so look man is kind of like these earlier but he's a manifestation of it in later editions of the culture yeah I think you could make a case that because because the narcissistic personalities are forming a narcissism grounded in an escape from fragmentation most schools of psychoanalytic flawed in their theory about pathological narcissism see pathological see the grandiose self as a defense against a terrible state of fragmentation I mean certainly Heinz covet self psychology sees the grandiose self as a defense against the fragmented self and he talks about fragmentation prone personalities now he the difference between Cohutta and lock eyes that Cole had is writing about what he sees as particular pathological types whereas Lacan is generalizing in an existential way he's saying we're all fragmentation from ourselves that is what it is to be human is to be fragmentation prone and that's why we get addicted to the mirror image mmm-hmm you know yeah thank you okay okay so well there's this whole thing about chess case Miguel and groom bears Jay and jenny lind and that whole story about the jewel encrusted mechanical bird that replaces the real Nightingale until the mechanical Birds mechanism jams and the Emperor is dying and he sends his retainers to go into the to bring back the real Nightingale so that what what they're saying is that the real Nightingale of traditional psychoanalysis has been replaced in Paris by this jewel-encrusted mechanical bird Jacques Lacan you know they're very disillusioned with what they see as the Lacanian usurper of real analysis because the centrality of the unconscious is disappearing in what kind what he would he and he would he and his followers would say the opposite he would say that he's bringing the unconscious back big time and he would say that the reason he's doing that is because the unconscious was disappearing in traditional analysis what's the truth there I don't know I mean I do believe there I don't unlike these more modern recent relational schools of psychoanalysis who I think have lost the unconscious I don't think the Lacanian see yeah I I see two big divides in contemporary psychoanalysis you've got the Freudians and the Lacanian x' and the kleinian x' on the one hand all working with the unconscious and then you have the relational and the self and the interest subjectivity who i think to a considerable extent have lost the unconscious now of course there are overlaps and so on but but these are the two tendencies and actually there are these two institutes in toronto that kind of represent these two tendencies this place is much more along the lines of Freudian Lacanian kleinian and what we're really trying to listen to teach people how to listen with the third ear although we have classes here of candidates who don't want to and I'm wondering why are they not at that other Institute across they'd be more at home there you know because in some of the relational schools for the analysts to actually listen with the third ear and to suggest what the patient is really saying is seen a psychological rate is seen as abuse as seen as an authoritarian assault on the patient driven by an authoritarian patriarchal analyst who thinks he knows best so they don't have the metaphor of the third year at this other place and now well I guess they know about it and disapprove of it okay can you stay a little bit more because I love that idea of the third year well that's back to dream theory that's that's just I mean the Freudian then the kleinian and I think the Lacanian whenever they hear people a conversation or some free association or they look at a text they're saying that's surface that's manifest what's behind it's the tradition of suspicion it's the art of mistrust it's how do i decode this to get behind to what's really going on here and that is the essence of psychoanalytic listening in my opinion now of course you have to listen to what the patient is consciously saying but but you know like so here's here's a patient look I'm old now it doesn't happen but but when I was younger it happened so you know this woman patient is daily trying to convince me that the only way I can cure her is to sleep with her okay she's in love with me and and you know we should end the analysis and go get married and that's gonna be the cure okay and she's trying to seduce me in every possible way but I'm afraid iam and so on I'm hearing that's the manifest message what's the latent message please maintain boundaries please be a good daddy please don't succumb to temptation please be a responsible adult I'm getting two messages from this woman and and in the self psychologist say well you've got to empathize with your patient and I say which patient have you not heard of the Freudian revolution there's no one patient there's no one anybody we're all double so which patients should I listen to you know I'm listening to both patients but I'm busy trying to show my patient that she's sending this alternative message that she doesn't want to know that she's sending but it's very clear that she's sending that's psychoanalytic work okay and and if you lose that you've lost psychoanalysis all of this attuning to affectin and empathic linkage and blah blah blah Wow yeah it's necessary to hear what the patient is saying on the conscious level but my god you don't have to have psychoanalytic training to do that you know I think we have some technical knowledge that we need to have which is all about getting underneath and hearing what's coming across underneath you know um okay so yeah he attracts these transferences big-time I'm saying I'm saying that there are these two large groupings Freudians Klein Ian's and Lacanian 'he's all of whom retain the psychoanalysis retain the psychoanalytic centrality of the unconscious and then there are the relational self and intersubjectivity people who I think have lost the unconscious to a considerable extent but I place Lacan with Freud and Klein you'd have to read groom bears a anxious gasp Miguel they have various technical criticisms of luck ah but but I can't put my I can't tell you what there I don't think there was any one big thing necessarily that they well they felt that he was okay here's one of the big things I guess they they felt that with his emphasis on language he was not paying attention to a fact that has been the big knock on Loch Awe by mainstream psychoanalysts it's it's it's abstract it's intellectualized it's all about words and signifiers this is even Julia Kristeva is not on lock oh yeah she distinguishes between the symbolic and what she calls the semiotic and the semiotic is is a language of emotion and love and and hate and it closer to the body and so on and so forth but yeah the big knock is that Luca ignores effect this is unfair it's very clear it's not true I mean look how does a whole year seminar on anxiety and anxiety is an effect it's only it's a negative one which kind of goes with a lot of his other prejudices it seems negative one like Kierkegaard who also writes big time about anxiety but there are there are other ways that Lacan definitely does get at effect although I have to say I mean that's one of the reasons I moved on from Luca was because I didn't feel that he was dealing with effect enough so I think maybe there's something something to the charge but it's too sweeping a charge you know it's too sweeping there's a recent book by the Lacanian colette Solaire sol ers colette solare recent book on luca where she takes on precisely this charge that macaw ignores effect and she goes through Lacanian theory and refutes the charge I hear I haven't read it but I hear it's a very good book well that's Solaire look I mean I think a lot of groom bears Jay and Ches case Miguel's complaint was kind of envy I mean Lacan was all the rage of Paris and these were ordinary enough analysts doing their work a day work in their offices and and and Paris was abuzz with lucky' you know he stole the show uh he he came to be thought of as what psychoanalysis is when people use the word psychoanalysis they meant Latini in psychoanalysis so they felt usurped and I think that's a big a big part of it oh well look there's also the politics the politics you see LeConte practiced the short session and I'm not going to dam the sort the short session because I think I think he had a certain validity of technique here but he would end the session you see again he from he takes from Heidegger Heidegger has the distinction idle i idle talk idle talk that's the talk of the mass man the fort for Heidegger idle talk that that Lacan takes that and makes an empty speech empty speech actually where did I come across some someone beyond beyond talked about a patient who uttered speech from which thought had been removed you know the patient uttered speech from which thought had been removed now I thought that's a way of trying to get at idle idle talk Heidegger and empty speech blah calm okay so the patient comes in and if the patient is engaged in empty speech which is you know like superficial chitchat blah blah blah he's not getting down to doing what he's supposed to do which is free-associate bring dreams at cetera right Lacan would cut the session and the patient would sell some patients were getting five minute sessions paying full so Lacan was stacking up the franc notes on his desk the patient would pay for five minutes now it also worked the other way occasionally if the patient was really on a roll with full speech he would extend the session to an hour and a half sometimes but mostly it was cutting the session okay so this meant that ordinary analysts who adhere to the 50-minute rule could have maybe eight patients a day macaw could have twenty eight patients a day you see they all were waiting when you went for your session you say in a waiting room with ten other people you never knew when you were gonna get into sea like ah and you never knew how long you were going to be in there so Lacan had vast numbers of people in analysis that is well he had major charisma well because he held forth at the Sorbonne once a week Foucault was there Roland Bart was there everybody was there everybody who was anybody in the intellectual life of Paris was at lakhan's lecture okay so no wonder everybody wanted to be an analysis with lucky' and and with the short session he was able to accommodate vast numbers of people now a lot of these people went on to become trained and qualified analysts now once you're a trained and qualified analyst and you've been analyzed by Lacan you're now a member of the Society and you've got a vote well look I had a hundred votes compared to Jeanine chess Geismar gal who might have had five votes he created acolytes and they were running the show because they were part of the Loch Awe cult you see now you can see the kind of corruption that this can lead to and probably did lead to but it's a peculiar kind of corruption because like if he really was a Charles Manson he wouldn't have kept disbanding these psychoanalytic societies so you know he breaks with the main Freudian group while they kick him out when when he's kicked out of the IPA for the short session it wasn't his ideas that got him kicked out of the IPA mind you as I've said before any money and anybody with a great mind get kicked gets kicked out of the IPA so I'm confessing I don't have a great mind because I'm still in the IPA okay they kicked him out not because of his ideas they they kicked him out because of the short session that's kind of a clever technique though because as I understand it that's just about the only violent that an analysis and an analyst is allowed to do to the times up uh uh and if you if you want to do the violent act in a disciplinary way to make your analyze and right wake up then sing your waste for my time do it for five minutes I can talk so here is compare map here we compare look on to the Zen master who hits the disciple with a stick okay you give them you give the disciple a co n what is the sound of one hand clapping and you know he puzzles like this for ten years and he comes in he gives his stupid answers and and the master wax them you know like uh does that as you say he does that no of course it's a cut he's cutting the session and castration cutting the cuts is central to his theory so he cuts the session and this is called punctuation now the cutting of the session is only one way to punctuate there are other ways to punctuate well that's what any mainstream Freudian would do any mainstream Freudian would not cut the session but would interpret the resistance would simply point out I see that you're full of idle talk today so why do you suppose that you are full of chitchat and cliches today instead of getting down to free association and bringing me a dream that's what a mainstream that's what I do I'm not a Lacanian I I don't practice that way on the other hand I'm a little intrigued and a little impressed because I I have supervised Dan umber of Lacanian analysts who are interested in working our way and and and sometimes they're not cutting the session but they're using other forms of punctuation which are pretty ingenious like they'll end the session not early but they'll end the session with a pun or some kind of remark that a little bit jerks the rug out from under the patient a little bit or just underlines like we bowled when we're you know they underline something well okay the example that comes to mind is from a non Lacanian analyst to his approached by a middle-aged woman who's never had an orgasm and she wants to have an orgasm before she dies and she asked for analysis and he agrees and so they work out the they're looking for four to four sessions a week and they work out with some difficulty they get a time on Monday and then they struggle like hell for a time on Tuesday and then eventually they get to the Thursday and then and it see it's just like he keeps offering her times the fourth session she says I can't come there no I can't come in okay so you can't come he says so you can't come the Lacanian would say something like that I get it you can't come we're done for today you know so you do something that startles and it drives home the point in a way that a standard analytic technique doesn't sometimes sure no I don't think these two things are incompatible I think a creative analyst can do what you're saying Michael like interpret the resistance but can also throw in some of these things from time to time you can work out a little that's why I'm interested in talking to Lacanian because so he was he was booted out of the International psychoanalytic Association because he was using this short yes and and so what was the comeuppance from all of that but besides him well he became all a morph they made him a martyr they made he had now the distinction of having been kicked out he he now had the distinction of joining Erich Fromm Carl Gustav Jung Otto rank all of the other great minds who'd gotten kicked out he he's developing his ideas that at the time when may 1968 the student revolution in Paris it was head cachet to be a rebel or revolutionary hmm I mean in some ways he was he was a high bourgeois figure who he went around in like a mink a mink coat and stacks of francs he drove him he drove a Jag well but then the rumor is the student leader of the may 68 students was Daniel cohn-bendit was a German national he was studying in Paris an anarchist and leader of the may 68 group and he was being hunted everywhere by the Jones arm how does he get out of Paris in the trunk of jacques lacan jaguar okay so this is the kind of guy he is you know he's kind of all over the map and he's grandiose he's beloved of the left probably for not good reasons because I don't think his instincts were very left or democratic or anything else if you're dealing with a wrapped too tight obsessional high-functioning neurotic it's probably just what the doctor ordered but if you're working with a wrapped toulouse hypersensitive borderline you're gonna get suicides and there are there were rumors of suicides so you know and whether whether he on the other hand you know i mean there are stories I've seen interviews with former patients who talked about him and I'm struck by this one patient he was a Holocaust survivor and she had been tortured and couldn't ever get over the trauma of being tortured by the Gestapo and Lacroix gets up and approaches her and places her hand on her skin like this and I don't know whether he utters the word Gestapo or not but just stop Paul just ah pull in French a touching of the skin just a gesture a touch of the skin just Paul Gestapo he does this and she felt literally and existentially touched and felt that he understood something and she felt very empathic alee so you hear these stories and you listen to interviews of people who were were treated by him it's a very complicated story it's so easy to stereotype and to assume what's going on here with this guy do you think that he was good at offering a sense of containment to patients who were suffering no I doubt it very much because I think that probably the large majority of the people he was treating precisely because of his charisma and so on they were they were they were PhD students in in in in social science and they were they were highly intellectual types they probably weren't that fragile you know but I suppose a few fragile people got into his practice and watch out I mean I would never trust him with a fragile patient of course I would never have referred a patient to in period you know I mean he's grandiose and he's got this sadistic streak and now the picture you've painted of the majority of his practice sounds like people that are exactly like him which sounds to me like the blind leading the blind well I mean look you know what graduate students are like they're all narcissistically disordered I mean to be a graduate student is to suffer from a narcissistic disorder I mean they're full of themselves they're there they're up there they're busy trying to be brilliant and fearing that they're stupid and I mean you know the Graduate School is a terrible place of psychopathology of a narcissistic sort being acted all over the place and so that's the milieu I think in which he's analyzing a lot of people and a lot of the people he's analyzing are there because they want to be psychoanalysts and there they're trying to enter into the field through a training analysis with him okay I'm gonna try and read this paragraph out loud to you just so that everybody can hear what it what it says but it's it's about lakhan's understanding of the unconscious and what the paragraph says is as Lacan understood the unconscious and its primary processes far from representing a subhuman a social and pre cultural chaos of drive energies is already symbolically that is culturally structured in accordance with the very laws of condensation and displacement that Freud discovered and that Lacan following Jacobsen recognized as the laws of substitution metaphor and combination metonymy and composed the synchronic and diachronic axes of linguistic structure respectively right so please unpack that for me because I think it's very important but I don't actually understand any of it okay okay so there's a huge shift in Freud's thinking that people have not paid enough attention to between the early Freud and the laters right I mean people have noticed that you know he was much more liberal thinking as a young man I guess a lot that's kind of the cliché often young men are radicals and as they become older they get conservative whether that's true in general it certainly was true of Freud but one of the big differences is that the younger Freud saw the unconscious as structured as organized and he saw himself as he saw his central discovery as precisely the discovery of the laws that structure the unconscious mind and these are the laws of condensation and displacement what he calls the primary process the five elements of which are condensation displacement symbolic representation that is picture language symbolism this is his collective unconscious Universal transhistorical in all times in all places guns daggers are phallic etc etc symbolism and then what he called secondary revision in the case of the dream theory but he saw the unconscious mind as organized as ordered and and therefore he would have had no problem thinking that an artist might want to dip into the unconscious into the primary process to come up with a new creative way of were during experience it was not at all chaotic it was ordered now of course Lacan says the unconscious is structured like a language Lacroix is not saying the unconscious is a language a lot of people misunderstand that he's not saying it's a language he's saying it's structured like a language and in saying that he's just being Freudian because Freud thought that the unconscious was structured condensation and then it was the roman it was the the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson who recognized the condensation is simply metaphor okay treat is substituting one thing for another on the basis of similarity I gave the example of the foot going into the shoe the foot is like a penis that she was like vagina so you dream about trying on shoes and all night no idea that it's about intercourse but that's condensation and then there's displacement which is recognized by Jakob syn as metonymy metonymy is shifting from one thing to another they're not on the basis of similarity but on the basis of contiguity things that go together so the president the president and the White House the patient dreams of bacon sizzling and then her associations go to eggs and then her association goes to the broken condom and she's wondering whether the egg is fertilized turns out to be a pregnancy anxiety dream doesn't look like that at all there's the disguise and based on contiguity so so Freud has discovered that the unconscious is structured by the very laws of of metaphor and metonymy that govern linguistic structure and and for for ferdinand de saussure in his semiotic s-- he talks about the diachronic and the what's the other one thing chronic the synchronic and the diachronic the diachronic is displacement contiguity synchronic is condensation is metaphor and and and so Lacan looks at this and says okay Freud is just coming to the same conclusions using a different language hmm okay but then Freud drops all of that and the older Freud see when the cow is said to be returning to Freud he really should have said returning to the earliest Freud and the earliest Freud is the Freud of 1900 the interpretation of Dreams 1902 the psychopathology of everyday life and I think it's 1903 or for jokes and their relation to the unconscious and these are all on the level of hermeneutic interpretation I mean it's he doesn't call it the explanation or the causes of dreams he calls it the interpretation of dreams and and the dominant metaphors at this time is the metaphor of texts the dream text and the metaphor is decoding Freud is writing about having to translate translation as a metaphor decoding is a metaphor these are all linguistic metaphors okay and this is the law this is the Freud that macaw is returning to and this is the Freud who is very much about listening with the third year decoding from the manifest to the latent getting it what's underneath so you see that in that sense Lacan is very much Freudian in the early Freudian emphasis on the unconscious this is not about the ego this is not about developing an ego this is not about ego strength this is not about super-ego this is about the fact that we speak a language we don't know that we speak and this is what look now the older Freud liked it I think in the paper I don't give the actual quotation but but in the ego in the it'd Freud describes the in as a caldron of seething energies a chaos a called gnaw cauldron is a witch's cauldron that's where you throw the frogs and the snakes and you stir a cauldron a witch's brew but is that the same thing is saying the unconscious when he's saying that because like he's shifted the language to the to the yeah he's still talking about the unconscious because the unconscious is equated pretty much with the Ed which we've said before is very biologically Rita rooted and sort of supercharged in his Rajoy it bubbles up from bodily zone yes okay and and he calls it a cauldron of seed a chaos of seething energies like seething is the word he uses like snakes see then you know this is a snake pit you know and this is the unconscious it's a snake pit you know and now he's moving to the right politically because if this is the it'd we better build barriers against the in if this is man's core nature then we better have police we better have law because because human beings have this chaotic seething then there's this idea that this is drug but this is driving the punishing super-ego right well and the super-ego starts coming in big and we need the super-ego Freud is thinking precisely because of our tendencies to create to regress into this chaos okay and and now that the unconscious is not something an artist could ever hope to draw any structure out of because it's a chaos and and and now what is psychosis psychosis is the scary regression into the chaos it's being overwhelmed and taken over by and the ego defenses and the super-ego and ego defenses break down and one is one one one winds up back in the chaotic soup again you see which is why Freudian analysts are so afraid of psychosis and they sit the patient up and they start doing reality therapy and and so on that's their view of psychosis anyway did I unpack it yeah that was very helpful that very much okay and why use a word condensation for for Lacan sorry for look Tom look is it Lacan that uses the word contents that's Freud's to operate them yeah Freud is simply recognized Lacan is simply recognizing Freud's condensation as metaphor Oh laws of substitution yeah as metaphor and combination is metonymy okay I was thinking substitution as well they're both substitution yeah one is a substitution on the basis of similarity that's metaphor the other is substitution based on contiguity yeah which is metonymy which is displacement I was just I was I thought that the words went together that condensation went with substitution and displacement what went with combination well some people might talk about it that way I I'm just thinking of I mean the the disguise work the dream work operates by substituting one thing for something else hmm but there are two forms of substitution similarity contiguity the word law that Freud would use the word law like laws of the unconscious mind just sort of had super-ego sort of like I was kind of unclear a couple classes ago I thought I heard you say at one point that Freud was trying to get rid of super-ego but then in another at another point was saying that he was he was actually for yes submission and yes so this is this is the kind of contradiction in Freud Freud is contradictory in so many ways that's part of what makes him great that means that matter of the ages though like if you were to read him at one point you'll be saying one thing and then another I don't think it's so much a timing thing no it's not that he's evolving from an early position to a late well I think I just gave you an example where he does evolve from an early to a late the early idea of the unconscious has structured the late view of the unconscious as chaos that's a time change over time but in terms of his contradictions regarding the super-ego not so much that the contradiction here is whether he's talking clinically or whether he's talking socio-political yeah okay see at the very same time I might have been in the same year he's writing a clinical paper in which he's aware that that this patients suffering is due to a savage super-ego that he's having to defend against by obsessional or hysterical or some kind of Defense's and so there he's there he's calling for the demolition of the super-ego because the super-ego is what's driving this patient crazy that's a individual case that's a joke and that's clinical thinking ok but now he switches to being a sociologist writing civilization and its discontents and now as a sociologist he's saying we need the cops we need the super-ego because this kid is so anti-social so that's a talk of a chaos that's when the he wants to pretty go around and he wants yes he's talking about yeah the chaos is 1923 civilization is discontent since 1930 these are both the older Freud Freud is now afraid of the unconscious he's now afraid of the ED he's seeing destructiveness coming from the end and he's seeing defense against destructiveness coming from the super-ego and from social order and of course here is where I feel he is fundamentally mistaken because what I'm saying is that it's exactly the reverse that the evil is coming from the super-ego as he knows clinically and it's coming from the super-ego it's coming from society because society is racist sexist heterosexist materialist and that's what loads the super-ego and where does goodness come from did the animal in man and it turns out animals are far more pro-social helpful altruistic then Freud's image of of the animal world is like it's like destructive beasts you know me he talks about the Beast in man well you know my point is it would be far better if I mean wouldn't that Bernardo and Homolka had been beastly because if they've been beastly they never would have behaved in such a disgustingly human way okay and is that just like a time that he was alive in that informs how he thinks oh well yeah I mean because he's a nineteenth-century shapes is thinking and and and the Beast is associated with darkest Africa and black people and primitive cultures and the animal and all of that is lumped together as something that Western white civilization is trying to defend itself against so there's a whole and has evolved away from and has evolved away from and in the end is in danger of regressing into and of course he associates woman with the Dark Continent you know he says I'm aware there was this Minoan Mycenaean the oedipal thing with the mother in the job he says it to me it's a Dark Continent it's like the Beast it's like Africa it's like the mother it's like the woman's body I mean this is not just Froy there's a whole tradition of this kind of thinking in Western thought and erich fromm even himself doesn't escape it entirely I mean he how could he this is ingrained and you know he was trained in the early part of the 20th century he's infected by this although he breaks out of it to our markable degree because of our Colvin's thinking about an early matriarchy that that Fromm pays attention to interestingly you know who else did Friedrich Engels in with a holy fan the Holy Family at angles was was was aware of this baclofen and and and this idea of a primitive matriarchy which is a very interesting thing so that I think Fromm gets it through both his Marxism and his otherwise awareness of a back opens thought anyway back to Telecom so well so I want to say oh we're reading Freud through Christian culture I guess we've we've we've covered this he's a Christian atheist he is not seeking to defend the religion of Roman Catholicism but there's this guy Marcus Pound who's alakay nian philosopher in England Briscoe I think anyway he's all over LA cause texts trying to interpret Lacan essentially as a kind of a theologian he sees the secret engine of Lacan saw thought as theology as a defense of the Roman Catholic religion and to me this is a complete violation and distortion of lakhani in theory McCaw is not seeking to defend the Roman Catholic religion he just happens to be an atheist who like me happens to agree with a lot of Christian anthropology that's all and and I think pound is really trying to exploit him for theological purposes that do you think in any of your readings and researches do you get the sense that Khan believes in the human soul well he ha if he were here he would do etymology around the word soul and he would show that it's linked to the word psyche I mean he would remove he would not be interested in any of the religious connotations of the soul he would he would be talking about psyche and I guess what I'm getting at is that like handmade it's safe for Catholics to go to psycho analyses actly and so I'm wondering if it's because some somehow in his vastly Baroque writing style Catholics can feel like the this fundamental idea of their immortal soul has been retained yes yes but not because he's defending the immortality but only because he rejects the Roman Catholic Church is fighting a war against materialism and reductionism and man cannot be reduced to an animal man cannot be reduced to the biological body the human psyche cannot be reduced to the brain ok now this doesn't mean an immortal soul if you're an atheist forget the immortality forget the supernatural but but but but by by by clearly making the distinction between human desire and organic need that that psychoanalysis is about life in the new all sphere not life in the biosphere suddenly Catholics can now embrace psychoanalysis but they can't embrace Freud's reductionistic materialistic biologist ik philosophy no that's alien to the judeo-christian understanding of the human situations happening in the semiotic unconscious in the beginning was the word and the word this is the opening of the Gospel according to John in the beginning was the word and God said okay and and Lacan and Catholicism Jesus Christ is the logos the Word of God okay so this is all about communication this is about symbolism this is about words this is about texts this is about man as a signifying being okay now Catholics can buy that they would love to inject supernaturalism they would love to inject immortal soul but if you're an atheist Catholic you're just content with Lacanian psychoanalysis because it gets that what we are our signifying beings who live in the world but who live in the house of language right that that's that's that's what makes them compatible with the polis ISM and why Catholics love them and why they can't accept Freud reductive materialism I mean every poll every papal encyclical is an attack on the materialism of the modern world we do sing everything to matter right you don't have to go play tennis and say that mind is more real than matter you don't have to join the idealist philosophical tradition you just have to refuse reduction to materialism okay burst and my friend Dan burst and points out Lacan was a Catholic intellectual who was not widely known for being a Catholic intellectual oh the Bohr omean rings there's a just as there's a middle out an early a middle and a late Freud so there's an early middle and a late la caja and the later Lacan has some very interesting things to say about psychosis he borrows this idea of the the Borromean knots and these are these three rings right the Bora Mian rings and they symbolize the Trinity because there's rings linked Father Son Holy Spirit and these rings appear on the coat of arms of the family of st. Charles Borromeo 1538 to 1584 who was the car a cardinal and the Archbishop of Milan and so here late in his career he's borrowing this idea of the bar omean rings to try to understand what happens in psychosis now that the rings are symbolic imaginary and real these are the three rings the symbolic the imagining and the real and in order to not be psychotic these have to be connected they have to be linked they have to be integrated in some way but but they've come undone and there's that song by the Canadian band The Guess Who but guess who she's come undone she's come undone love that song Lacan says some people come undone the three rings come on done and and then he proposes this idea of what he calls the sinthome which is a play on the word symptom but it's also sin Homme sinful man there's another see he's into this verbal kind of play but but the sinthome is something that links the three rings together again it's it's something kind of artificial that the patient often finds on his or her own that helps them come together and it might be something that looks and maybe would be considered pathological but when but it's better than the person being completely undone it's it's not not a complete cure but it's a repair it's a repair job it's I just saw a parallel with Heinz Coburn because the because Heinz coha tried to distinguish entry in treatment of patience who suffers from severe fragmentation of the cells a complete cure would be to reintegrate the self so it's no longer fragmented but colvett says that's often too much to ask with certain cases he says it's enough to help the patient restore their defenses we're not curing we're but we're helping the pay the patient came to us because their defenses against fragmentation have fallen apart and if we can only help them reintegrate the defenses that's maybe cure enough okay Lacoste seems to be saying something similar here he's saying I think I think completely similar actually I think identical you know there's some people who've come undone we can't we can't really heal the fragmentation but we can somehow help restore a kind of a defence now in the psychoanalytic literature there's already discussions that are a bit like this like for example there are some analytic writers who write about a perversion as essentially what Lacan would call a sinthome the perversion prevents this guy from going psychotic you don't want to cure his perversion because without his perversion he's gonna become psychotic so helped him get his perversion back together again because the alternative is worse okay my son is interested in Lacan and he's playing around he's an addiction specialist and he's playing around with the idea of addiction as a sinthome there are plenty of people who if it weren't for their alkyl Deeley alcohol intake or their cocaine or their weed or whatever it is they'd be psychotic you know the addiction saves them from psychosis not that the addiction doesn't cause plenty of other problems in and of itself like cirrhosis of the liver bla bla bla bla but they're they're they're treating themselves in a certain way and preventing a psychotic regression so Luca is kind of talking about this can you say so there's the three rings and one is synth symbolism or symbolize this symbolic order the imaginary order and the real okay so can you talk about the symbolic order and the imaginary order and what makes them different from each other well what and then talk about how all three are fundamentally integrated or can be brought into harmony you're asking too much I mean yeah but let me say so let's talk about the difference between the imaginary and the symbolic okay and the imaginary for Lacan blurs difference it blurs it papers over it doesn't confront us with gaps and boundaries in the same way that the symbolic does take the imaginary is like magical thinking the imaginary has its beginning in the mirror stage when the child falls in love with an image okay now as long as we are in love with images we're in the imaginary we're not in the symbolic but at about 18 months child falls in love with the image at six months around 18 months which by the waist when Jean Piaget says language function kicks in then we have the possibility of moving to the symbolic and and now we have the possibility of breaking out of our misidentification our false identification with our images we now become capable of making a distinction right there's a duality now there's now the duality that need called me versus I that Locke Allah calls image versus subject okay so at 18 months language enables subjectivity to open up and and and implicitly at that moment there is a triangulation there is there is me there is I subject there is the image me and there is the bar or the cut now there's a triangle i image the third now of course what is that bar and boundary lid nom du pere the name of the Father which in French is homophonic with 'no known du pere the no of the Father the name of the Father the no of the Father paternal function the paternal function doesn't have to be a real not the real no it's it's it's it's what cuts imaginary from symbolic okay it divides me as image from me as subject and it moves me into an area into a tertiary area a third area and now I'm into the Oedipus complex father has entered the scene there's now three there's mother me and dad there is the subject the ego and the bar that separates them and the paternal function needs be an actual father it can be mother performing the paternal function it's any any anything that comes between and now we've moved into the area of triangles we've moved into the world of the three and now so we're now we're now we're neurotic we're now preoccupied with he's supposed to be dating her but I saw him walking home with Janey holding hands I mean this is you know this is what makes the world go around literature soap operas the eternal triangle we're now in that area we're in the area of neurosis now we've entered into the symbolic order we're now there is a law a law against incest you know these two should not get together there has to be about a bar between these two in Trobriand it's brother and sister and whatever you know mother and son father and daughter the bar is placed there okay so so in the imaginary resemblence declines paranoid schizoid position the imaginary is a narcissistic position because I still think I'm my image so there's a associations with an omnipotent sense yes yes yes there's this there's not a full recognition because it's before they see as you move into the symbolic order there's a castration that takes place I am NOT the the center so would it be wrong to say that magical thinking is a feature of this I think magical thinking is certainly to the extent that lakhan's imaginary equates to client's paranoid schizoid position both are magical narcissistic and omnipotent and the move into clients depressive position is is is an encounter with a surrender of omnipotence and encounter with dependency and encounter with lack just as it is with lakhan's move into the symbolic this is why kleinian x' and Lacanian are having these dialogues because there's a great compatibility you know between the theories on this level so is there something like as fundamental as like a reality principle going on in that shift and that certainly Freud's for Klein the move out of PS into D is a move in which an intensification of reality testing and it's precisely because my reality testing is improved as I move into D that I discover the reality of my non omnipotence I discover the reality of my dependence on other people I discovered the reality of lack and loss and therefore I'm warned this is exactly the same as Lacan the move into the symbolic is the move into castration lost lack living with lack realizing I will always lack realizing I can never be the object who is the center this is a total compatibility it's interesting too isn't it because Klein is and sizing the importance of maternal functions and containment thank you for coming today and Lacan is now you're pointing to the difference on on to the paternal foot so they're they're really like two halves of the same walnut well Luca is Freudian in this respect he's patriarchal he's emphasizing the role of the father the paternal function there's no matter all function in Luca Chris Davis says he's got the symbolic he doesn't have the semiotic you see like okay turn to Derrida Derrida argues that that Western culture has been characterized by what he calls the metaphysics of presence and I believe that Luca has simply swung to the opposite and embraced a metaphysics of absence okay and I think that's no improvement and and that's why the book is called a dialectical critique okay because I'm always trying to overcome then one-sidedness of these positions and I'm always in a Hague alien way trying to get to a third thing I'm also trying one of the big points of the book was to refuse the silos see the silos only Freudians talk to Freudians only Lacanian you see and there's that there's been this norm in psychoanalysis that if you're not Lacanian you shouldn't be talking about imaginary symbolic and real if you're not kleinian you shouldn't be talking about paranoid schizoid and depressive okay you're supposed to stick to your silo well you know to hell with that it's time now for analysts to break out of their silos and to start talking across the way we're just talking about Klein and look up okay but but certainly with Freud Lacroix is into the metaphysics of absence he privileges lack as does Ernest Becker privileged death over life I said my early review of Becker's book was should have been called the denial of life okay I mean that's the one-sidedness you see and he's with luck ah he's with that's that's metaphysics of absence but there is presence you know but you don't want to just swing over and start celebrating presents okay so there is paternal function and there is mat journal function and you're not going to learn about maternal function from Freud and you're not going to learn about it from Locke ah you are gonna learn about it from Melanie Klein Kohut some of the relational people they go heavily into maternal function and they forgotten about Pat turtle function now how does the optimally functioning analyst work he does both he has to and there's no need to Jenna there's no need to gender this that it might also say that a nanny lays and needs more than one analyses in there in their lifetime one from a person who could provide the maternal function one you could provide that yeah okay that's better than getting only one but but ideally there's no reason why we shouldn't expect analysts to grow to the point where they can provide both but the analyst isn't the center of the relationship the analyst and is yes but the Anna analysand has to have an analyst who can hear and contain what it is that the analysand needs to see like my problems were primarily with my mother I couldn't I had two senior male analysts who wouldn't let me talk about my mother I had to go to a woman analyst okay now that's like what you're saying different okay that's what I had to do but I think that's kind of sad wouldn't it have been great if if I'd been able to find one analyst who could both mother and father me I think would be really sad if a person only found one mind in their lives oh really yeah yeah I agree I agree with that but I but look as an ideal as a fair I think a fairly realistic ideal for the training of analysts I mean I'm engaged in the training analysts and so ideally this is what people should be able to do this is this is how we should train analysts so that I don't want just I don't want the people I supervise to simply be Lacanian who are doing the cuts and the short and the punctuation and the paternal I want them to be able to do what be on calls containment and that Winnicott calls holding especially if their this is why I said it would be a disaster for these overly sensitive borderline patients to be in treatment with someone like laqad they would jump off a bridge you know the analyst has to be able to work both sides of the street you know well yeah the deal in realization of Freudian discourse that's a pretty clear part of the paper Freud takes we've talked about this before Freud takes a lot of things literally a woman can't have castration anxiety a man can't have Venus Envy Lacan really understands all of this and the distinction between the phallus and the penis I mean look that's crucial and he he opened up psychoanalytic feminism in France with the distinction between the phallus and the penis suddenly a generation of French feminists were able to begin to relate to psychoanalysis because women have a phallus as much as a man has a phallus and can fear losing it and this performs that was a crucial well Juliet Mitchell in 1974 or 76 wrote her great book psychoanalysis and feminism and she was very influenced by Luca and the book was quite a looking quite Lacanian not not entirely she went on to become a client in Juliette Mitchell it's interesting she started out as a Canyon and went on to become a Cline in so look I made that possible really so the the metaphor is Asian so it's really interesting isn't it that women can have a phallus but a man can't have a womb fundamental to the male psyche is the absence of ever being the container for new life only on the physical level only on the biological level but we live in the newest fear and there a man can be a woman a man can be a womb a man can be a breast and a good analyst must have that capacity to contain to be receptive to create a space beyond says the analyst should enter the session without memory or desire what he means is to clear himself to approach to offer the patient a certain kind of emptiness a certain kind of receptivity so I can't like if I'm if I'm a young male who's all trying to be foul like all the time I'm gonna make a lousy analyst yes the fallow centrosome Locka remains phallocentric there's absolutely no reason why why we have to call like I'm trying to be the object that the other desires there's no reason to call the object that the other desires phallus could be breast and that's what I guess I'm trying to point to you and I can't really get my head around it but the breasts the wound the maternal body that is able to give forth life right no male body can inhabit a male body I'm swear I'm getting really bile bile audience by logic into the biosphere here and looking out at the universe from that right but we're looking at my symbols and trying to give my life meaning is utterly different than a woman no look she grabbed other symbols and give different meaning to look at the symbols men grab look at creases no creative men create listen to the way creative men talk they talk about getting inseminated with a new idea they talk about the idea just stating inside themselves for many months they talk about feeling this new idea the new novel is kind of like growing inside themselves but they're not yet ready to talk about it because they have to protect it it's not yet ready to be spoken about and then finally they talk about getting ready to to give birth to it and and then they'll talk about the delivery right and that's all terribly sublimated of the Vignale energy and it's all good yeah but it cannot have the foundation of foundational knowledge that the woman's body all right we cannot have another other kind of creativity that that is not imaginary is not symbolic and is merely real yes we can't have that because on the level of the biosphere we're not females but we don't live fundamentally in the biosphere we fundamentally live in the newest fear you see that's why I've you see what psychoanalysts are very influence of Freudians and nowadays all kinds of different schools of analytic thought are terribly interested in gender issues they're interested in trans they're interested in queer theory they're interested in all of this stuff and I have zero interest in this zero interest because to me it's all irrelevant because to me what's really important is preliminary to all of that that to me that's just the costume store you go to uh-huh I'm gonna pick the male costume I'm gonna pick the female costume I'm gonna pick this intervening middle costume that's neither I'm not really good if you're interested in costume stores but but I'm interested in what gives you that fundamental sense that you can function in the world what makes you you you non paranoid enough to go to the party in the first place depending quite independent of how you dress up I mean what enables you to get out of bed in the morning I mean what enables you to advance from the paranoid schizoid into the depressive position what enables you to have a self let alone a gendered self forget the gendering of the self that is so secondary to being able to have a self at all in the first place now this is an unusual position for a psychoanalyst to take I mean or maybe a lot of kleinian 'he's do take this position I don't know hardly anyone says mmm you see but I like recently I've started to say it gender issues boring I mean I don't care whether the guy comes to my office wearing a dress or what who cares don't care who he sleeps with I don't care I want to know what enabled him to get out of bed in the morning and come to my office in the first place so the phallus oh well the foul separation from the penis and lacA because-- fellow centrism i mean there's no reason to call the object of the others desire phallic you know it's just his lingering what couldn't hatred wasn't it at the breast that was the question well for kleinian as it is for client's it is and for kleinian 'he's the penis is simply a sublimated breast or it's been a displacement from breast onto penis the nipple has now just gotten bigger and it's a Minoo the desire to suck a penis is basically rooted in the desire to suck a breast this is just a very old story that the people who study you know the transformation of Western civilization through the various stages I mean the patriarchal laws Zeus in in in the greco-roman simply replaced the female deities of the Minoan Mycenaean I mean those female deities were stripped of their power and and and and in in Iran in the in Greek and they're given a place the old female deities are given a place in the pantheon that they're then known as the Furies and that the reason they're given a place is because the patriarchal gods realize that unless these women gods are placated they're going to raise hell so we're gonna you know give them a place in the pantheon in the hopes that they'll settle down because if they don't settle down they're gonna make our lives absolutely miserable which they do anyway the Furies the Furies right right so this is just an echo in psychoanalysis of this ancient stripping of the mother of her power you know

Channel: Don Carveth

Views: 8,003

Rating: 4.4904461 out of 5

Keywords: Psychoanal ysis, Lacan, Paternal function, Maternal function, Metaphysics of absecne

Id: PMAiu2wm2jQ

Length: 101min 16sec (6076 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 06 2017